The Irish Army, the UN, Jadotville and the Congo

Actor Jamie Doran playing commandant Qunlan in the film ‘The Siege of Jadotville’.

By John Dorney. For further context see our interview with Declan Power here.

October 2016 saw the launch of a new Netflix film about the ‘Siege of Jadotville’ in 1961, where 150 or so Irish Army UN troops were besieged and ultimately captured (after putting up a good fight) by Katangese and European mercenary troops.

The film itself is good entertainment,the action is well shot, the performances are solid and it does a reasonable job of explaining some of the complexities involved to an Irish and international audience.

The wider political context might need some greater examination however, before the siege of Jadotville and the Irish Army’s role in the Congo are promoted to unsullied sources of national pride.

The Congo crisis

Patrice Lumumba.

The Congo became independent of Belgium in 1960, led initially by a firebrand nationalist, Patrice Lumumba. Almost immediately, the new Republic of the Congo, a vast state covering much of central Africa, lapsed into civil war as two Congolese provinces, Katanga and South Kassai, backed by Belgium and to a lesser extent by France, declared themselves to be independent states.

Lumumba, backed by the Soviet Union, dispatched his armed forces to put down the rebellions, leading to widespread disorder and loss of life.

Congo became independent in 1960 and was immediately plunged into civil war.

The UN mission, of which Irish troops became a part, was to stop the secession of the Katanga province from the Congo. Katanga contained important mines and a Belgian sponsored local leader named Tshombe attempted to secede, basically to control the mineral resources. Katanga also claimed to be a safe haven for Europeans, who were being attacked in other parts of the Congo.

Conor Cruise O’Brien.

Enter Conor Cruise O’Brien and Frank Aiken. O’Brien was acting as representative of the UN’s Secretary General, Dag Hanmarskold with regard to Katanga. O’Brien insisted that UN peacekeeping troops should be deployed to block the illegal secession of Katanga from the Congo. Aiken, a one time IRA guerrilla commander but by then a veteran of multiple ministerial jobs and Minister for External Affairs, agreed to provide Irish troops, who served alongside Swedish and Indian contingents.

It appears as if both O’Brien and Aiken interpreted the Katanga situation as vindicating the right of newly independent countries to be free of outside interference. But from the start it quickly became clear that it had really involved the UN in a complex local African conflict as well as in the meddling of outside powers.

The Niemba ambush and UN authorisation of force

Frank Aiken inspects Irish troops.

In November 1960, nine Irish soldiers were killed by Baluba tribesmen at Niemba in what appears to have been a case of mistaken identity. The Balubas had not supported the Katanga secession and several of their villages were burned as a result by European mercenaries in Katangese service.

The attack on the Irish troops, in which 25 Balubas were also killed, seems to have been the result of the tribesmen mistaking the white Irish troops for European pro-Katanga mercenaries.

The heavy casualties, as well as the manner of the deaths – the Irishmen were hacked and clubbed to death – caused great shock in Ireland, but also a certain amount of odd pride. The deaths in UN service appeared to show that Ireland was playing an honourable part on the world stage, carrying out a UN mandate.

Irish troops were deployed as part of a UN mandate to halt the secession of Katanga. But 9 of them died in an ambush with a local tribe.

However, the Congo crisis was only deepening. In December 1960 Patrice Lumumba, the Soviet client, was arrested by one of his generals – American backed Joseph Mobotu, handed over to the Katanga secessionist forces and killed. Now, as well as being a war over mineral resources, the Congo crisis became a front of the Cold War; the Soviets being outraged that their client had been ousted.

Jadotville in context

Irish prisoners being guarded by Katangese mercenary forces after the battle of Jadotville.

In February of 1961, the UN Security Council authorised its contingent in the Congo to ‘use force’ to end the Katanga secession, which ultimately triggered open hostilities between them and Katangese troops.

This was essentially the UN , in a manner that would be impossible today, trying to impose a solution that was not endorsed by either of superpowers – effectively for a short window playing an independent role.

In September 1961, Conor Cruise O’Brien ordered UN troops to seize control of Katangese mercenary positions in Elizabethville, the Katanga capital, dramatically upping the stakes in the UN-Katanga confrontation and causing fighting to break out between the two sides.

It was at this point that the Irish troops at Jadotville, part of the second Irish contingent to deploy to the Congo, came under attack at the isolated post at the mining town of Jadotville. The Irish company, 157 men under Commandant Quinlan, were surrounded by Katangese troops and mercenaries and were left utterly exposed by the outbreak of fighting between the UN and Katanga.

After a stiff fight in which the Irish took no fatal casualties but may have killed about 300 Katangese troops, the Irish under commandant Quinlan surrendered. An Irish, Indian and Swedish UN force tried but failed to relieve them and the Jadotville garrison, after running almost of out of ammunition and after prolonged negotiations, were taken prisoner. Irish veterans spoke of the local women baying baying for their blood in revenge for the local men killed in the battle. The Irish troops were however protected by European mercenaries and later exchanged in a ceasefire.

The Battle of the Tunnel

Irish troops at the battle of the Battle of the Tunnel.

Dag Hanmarskold, the UN Secretary General died in a plane crash in the Congo during the ceasefire negotiations. Meanwhile though, the game had changed.

Now that the United States had removed the Soviet clients in the central Congolese government, they now supported the UN military mission in Katanga and Dag Hanmarskold’s successor, U Thant of Burma, ordered the UN troops to retake the secessionist province.

In December 1961, a further Irish Army contingent was involved in heavy fighting in the ‘battle of the tunnel‘ which was fought to re-open UN communications into Elizabethville. Three more Irish soldiers died in the fighting there.While Irish troops again acquitted themselves well, this was a United Nations force openly fighting on one side in a local civil war; not something a modern Irish peacekeeping force would allow themselves to be part of.

In Katanga the UN forces including the Irish openly fought on one side of a civil war.

While all this was going on, as well as the war between the Katangese on one side and the UN and central government on the other, tribal warfare and other factional strife was raging within the region due to the breakdown of law and order.

In December 1962, Tshombe, the leader of Katanga, signed an agreement giving up the aspiration to independence and shortly thereafter, he was exiled and UN forces successfully occupied the main Katangan towns, including Jadotville. The UN force remained deployed in the Congo until 1964.

A total of about 6,000 Irish soldiers served in the Congo between 1960 and 1964, of whom 26 lost their lives. Despite Irish losses, Taoiseach Sean Lemass and Frank Aiken remained insistent that Irish troops would fulfill the UN mandate. They, by all accounts, did the best they could, though often under-resourced, left without a clear mission and, at Jadotville as least, left unsupported in an impossible military position.

The Irish Army tends to view the Congo mission as a watershed, its coming of age as a modern force and establishing itself as a credible component for future UN peacekeeping missions, It is still deployed in UN service today, notably in the Golan heights between Syria and Israel and in Lebanon.

Refugees uprooted by the more recent wars in the Congo.

But regarding the Congo mission itself, the wider question remains, was it worth it?

The Katangese secession was ultimately quashed, but only to reincorporate Katanga first under the authoritarian Mobutu regime in the renamed Zaire and eventually the failed dysfunctional state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

What, in political terms, did the UN mission in Katanga really achieve?

Today despite being fabulously wealthy in resources, Congo remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Foreign powers now, just as in the 1960s still hover, making sure they can extract the riches from the Congolese soil, but unlike the earlier period, the main players today are the Chinese. The idealistic premise of the likes of Conor Cruise O’Brien in the 1960s, that Africa would flourish if only it would be freed from predatory European powers, seems somewhat naive today.

All of which begs the question; would an independent Katanga from the Congo have been any worse than the states of which it was in fact part? And was the Irish military involvement there, without deprecating the bravery and commitment of the troops involved, really worthwhile?

If there is a lesson for today in the UN mission of 1960-1964 in the Congo, it is that force should only be applied for well thought out political objectives.

Thanks for a very well-written synopsis which is in line with my letter in last weekend’s Sunday Independent (Cruise O’Brien, Independent.ie, letters, 4th option). What happened in and with Katanga was, in my opinion, a tragedy and Cruise O’Brien behaved abominably.

John
Who was the engineer from Wexford working with Union Miniere who tipped off Commd Quinlan about the plans of the French mercenaries to attack the Irish soldiers thus leading to Commd Quinlan to dig trenches? He died recently but his widow still lives in Wexford.

I feel that the failure to incorporate within the educational system an in-depth study of the 1960-1964 Congo episode in all its aspects represents a lost opportunity with regard to the political-intellectual development of the intervening generations. The confrontation of the UN in its idealistic youth with the balefully convoluted real world of savage tribal conflict contorted and fuelled by cynical power block and external economic interests represented a paradigm of things to come.

In a very stark way the UN involvement in the Congo juxtaposes the desirability of the idealistic thrust with its limitations in real-world scenarios. Both the advocates of cynical realpolitik a priori and its opportunists are ever keen to have such idealism portrayed as otherworldly and as the author, ultimately and invariably, of more harm than good.

The portrayals of Dag Hammarskjöld and Conor Cruise O’Brien were obviously subject to the exigencies of plot and economy. Do these “in a nutshell” portrayals go so far as to be considered injust?

Ironically, the portrayal of Conor Cruise O’Brien reminded me to some degree of the caricatural portrayal of de Valera in another highly successful historical film.